Ever since she was 18 years old, Zorica Rebernik, a 67-year-old woman from Breze, a small town in Bosnia, has been surrounding herself with the color red, even getting married in a red gown, and attending funerals in red clothing.

Rebernik, a retired schoolteacher, lives in a bright red house filled with red furniture, eats from red plates, drinks from red glasses and sleeps on red bed sheets. All the clothes in her wardrobe are red and she even dyes her hair red. The only non-red appliance in Zorica’s home is a white heater, which she only agreed to after her husband, Zoran, insisted. She has been surrounding herself with the color red for the last four decades of her life, and today she is somewhat of a local celebrity because of it. Everyone knows her, and some even offer her red things as gifts, the woman said, adding that she would reject anything that wasn’t red.

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Several Swiss prisons have painted their jail cells in a color called “Cool Down Pink” as a way to curb prisoners’ aggressive behavior and even though the measure was adopted by other European countries in recent years, there are those who find the measure degrading and manipulative.

It’s a known fact that colors have a significant influence on our mood. It is said that red can stimulate our appetite, which is why you’re more likely to see it used in restaurants, as opposed to blue, which apparently suppresses the appetite. Every color is associated with various emotions which as a whole can influence our moods. For example, pink is usually associated with happiness and compassion, but also weakness and femininity. And that’s what makes it so controversial. Psychologists have long argued that it can have a calming effect on people, but using it in the penal system has also been described as humiliating, gender stereotyping and manipulative.

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For the last 20 years, Elizabeth Eaton Rosenthal, a.k.a. Elizabeth Sweetheart, a fine artist in Brooklyn, New York, has been dressing from head to toe in various shades of green. To her, green is the happiest, most positive color in the world, so she can’t imagine wearing anything else.

‘The Green Lady of Carroll Gardens’, as Elizabeth is most widely known, has always had a thing for experimenting. At one point in her life she wore only 1930s print dresses, before moving on to single colors, like silver, pink, purple, blue and finally green, which she surprisingly never got bored of. Her passion for green started with some home-mixed green nail polish and a neon lime streak in her hair, but it quickly spread to her clothing and her home, as well. Today, she always sports green hair, an attire made up of different hues of green, and most of the things she buys, from towels and skin care products to furniture and appliances, are also green.
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In a bid to make himself instantly recognizable, an Indian real estate agent has surrounded himself with the colors red and white. The man is so obsessed with these colors that they feature in all his clothes, in his car, and his home. He even buys his toothpaste in a red-and-white tube, with a toothbrush to match!

52-year-old Sevenraj, a real estate agent based in Bangalore, developed a fixation with red and white after he realized that it was a great gimmick to get people to notice him. His inspiration comes from Mahatma Gandhi, who was always clad in white. “Mahatma Gandhi is recognized by his glasses and bare torso with a white towel, so I had to do something similar to be recognized by one and all,” he said.

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Did you know that colors can be seen as well as heard? Well, now you do, thanks to 31-year-old Neil Harbisson, a color blind artist who spent years looking for a way of experiencing the colors of the world around him. For the past 10 years, Neil has been wearing an external electronic eye that picks up the frequencies of the colors before him and converts them into sound vibrations that he can hear. Initially he wore the device outside his head. But later, the London-based artist convinced surgeons to implant the chip int his skull to be able to perceive more intricate colors.

The idea for the device came about when Neil heard a cybernetics talk by computer scientist Adam Montandon at Dartington College of Arts in 2003. The pair then collaborated to create the device and Neil ended up memorizing various frequencies so he could recognize colors. So he still couldn’t see the colors, he could now hear and identify them. Neil, who was born with achromatopsia (a rare condition that allows him to see only black or white), said during a talk in 2012: “For me the sky is always grey, flowers are always grey and television is black and white.”

“But since the age of 21 instead of seeing color I can hear color. So I’ve been hearing color all the time for eight years so I find it completely normal to hear it all the time. At the start I had to memorize the names you have for each color and the notes but after some time all this information became a perception and I didn’t have to think about the notes and after some time this became a feeling. I started to have favorite colors and I started to dream in color.”

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